--- title: "Kamuy" sousTitre: "Chiri Yukie, the first Ainu to transcribe her people’s songs, gives voice to a world where the owl, the bear, the fire are persons who visit the human realm." description: "Kamuy, an Ainu word: not 'spirits of nature,' but a person—owl, water, fire—who visits the human world, speaks, and may be honored or offended." date: 2026-06-09 lang: en tradition: ainu auteurs: ["Chiri Yukie", "Shigeru Kayano"] --- # Kamuy Hokkaido, winter 1922. Bent over her notebooks, a nineteen-year-old woman writes in Latin script the songs her grandmother once chanted to her on snowy evenings, then translates them, line by line. Chiri Yukie is the first Ainu to transcribe her people’s oral literature—not some outsider folklorist collecting curiosities, but an insider’s voice preserving her own language before it vanishes. She will finish the manuscript the night before her death, her heart too frail to go on. Her preface opens on a lost paradise. In the past this spacious Hokkaido was our ancestors’ world of freedom. Living with ease and pleasure in the manner of innocent babes in the embrace of beautiful, vast nature, they were truly the beloved children of nature. Oh what happy people they must have been! Long ago, this vast Hokkaido was the free world of our ancestors. Living in ease and joy, like innocent children cradled in a beautiful, boundless nature, they were truly nature’s beloved. Oh, what a happy people they must have been! What follows is a lament: the land transformed, the hunters scattered, and this stark line—*A dying people. . . . That is our name.* Chiri Yukie wrote under the pressure of assimilation, convinced her ancestors’ words would vanish with the last speakers. She was wrong on one count: her collection is still read, and later, the elder Shigeru Kayano would carry the Ainu language into the halls of the Japanese Parliament. What she thought a tomb became a seed. But the heart of the matter lies not in grief. It lies in what these songs *do*. A divine *yukar* does not describe an animal from the outside: the animal speaks in the first person. The first song in the collection is that of the marsh owl—the fishing owl, guardian of the village. “Silver droplets falling, falling all around, golden droplets falling, falling all around.” Singing this song I came down, following the river’s flow. Over a human village I passed, and, gazing below, it seemed to me that those who were poor in the past were now rich, and those who were rich were now poor. “Silver drops falling, falling all around, golden drops falling, falling all around.” Singing this song, I descended along the river’s course. I passed over a human village and, looking down, it seemed to me that the poor of old were now rich, and the rich were now poor. *[Shirokanipe ranran pishkan]* The Ainu refrain the owl repeats between verses, transcribed by Chiri Yukie herself: “silver drops falling all around.” Each god in these songs has their own refrain—their sonic signature. It is the god who sings, not the poet who describes them. The owl is no symbol, no backdrop. It watches, judges, chooses: later in the song, it lets the golden arrows of rich children miss their mark and allows itself to be struck by the crude arrow of a poor boy, for it has seen nobility in his eyes. This is a *kamuy*—and the word cannot be rendered as “spirit of nature.” Sixty years after Chiri Yukie, Shigeru Kayano, raised by his grandmother Huci in the language of Nibutani, offers the simplest definition. A god dwells in each element of the great earth mentioned in these tales, she would tell us, in the mountains off in the distance from Nibutani, the running waters, the trees, the grasses and flowers. A god dwells in every element of the great earth these stories speak of, my grandmother used to tell us: in the distant mountains of Nibutani, the flowing waters, the trees, the grasses, the flowers. A god, Kayano says, *dwells* in each being; and these gods “resembled humans, spoke the same language, slept at night and worked by day, in the land of the gods.” This is what *kamuy* carries: not some diffuse force, not the sacred diffused in a great All, but **persons**. The owl, the hearth fire (*ape-huci*), the bear, even the boat made of local wood—each is a subject with its own dwelling, its own will, and its consent to visit our world for a time. Here is where we must draw the line before drawing parallels. We speak of “Nature”: a singular, an impersonal ground, a backdrop—at best a treasure to manage, at worst a stock to exploit. The Ainu word says nothing of the sort. A *kamuy* is not nature: it is a guest. You do not manage a guest; you welcome them. You do not exploit a visitor; you show them respect, and you know they can be offended. Where our language classifies the owl among observable things, the *yukar* places it among those who can say “I”—and who watch us as much as we watch them. When the bird in Hokui’s print tilts its head downward, the question is not what it is. It is who, seeing us, chooses to descend. ## Sources - Chiri Yukie, *Ainu shin'yōshū (Recueil des chants divins ainu)* — Sarah M. Strong, Ainu Spirits Singing, University of Hawai'i Press, 2011 (manuscrit de 1922, publié en 1923), trans. Sarah M. Strong (de l'ainu et du japonais vers l'anglais) ; rendu français maison - Shigeru Kayano, *Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir* — Westview Press, 1994 (orig. japonais, 1980), trans. Kyoko & Lili Selden (du japonais vers l'anglais) ; rendu français maison Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/reenchanter/2026-06-09-kamuy-chiri-yukie/